jFinger -- a Java finger client

I wrote this because I didn't have a finger client on my machine. Rather than spending an hour putzing around the net looking for one, I spent half an hour putzing around with Java and built one. :-) This is, of course, an application; a finger client that could connect only to the WWW server from which it was downloaded would be of marginal utility at best.

How it works: You call it from the command line as java jFinger user@foo.bar.com. It uses the StringTokenizer class to split the address you supplied it into a username and an address. It opens a socket connection to the address using the finger port (well-known port 79), and sends the username to the finger daemon running on the host, then reads back whatever finger information was available.

The source for jFinger.java

Note: Not everybody's email address maps back to a host running a finger daemon (for instance, fingering user@aol.com won't work), and not every host running a finger daemon allows outside users to finger local users (for instance, finger tvalesky@osf1.gmu.edu won't work). In the event that the program can't get finger information, it will either return without displaying anything, or will throw an exception.